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Page 5.

While fetching wood in the bitterly cold, black crookwood of polar Manaul, where wolvines howled in the alien night, she would remember how it was to walk down a leafy lane with her husband and her son. Gentle afternoon light slanted through early autumn leaves. She and Solan and Solanalos would be confident of the winter, for they had laid in plenty of stock and fuel. In case of emergency, the domed town of Ziw was only a six hour skimmer flight if need be. There had never been any cause for alarm, however. Every need and possible eventuality on Belair was planned, double planned, and triple-redundant. One's homestead was one's fortress, although there were no free-roaming predatory animals. It was civilization, as opposed to this savage nightmare. Did she regret signing up for the armed forces? Yes. But then again, she had done her share of good. She had handled thousands of severely injured combatants and civilians before being taken prisoner.

A Swarm corsair had shot up the hospital ship's escort cruisers. The black warship had disabled the hospital ship's main drives while ignoring her white surface paint and huge, concentric red target circles with an X-cross through them, as mandated under Treaty Marches protocols. The Swarm ship had towbeamed her into the Starways, a little-understood stream of hyperl!ght travel whose enigmatic highways crossed the galaxies. Starfaring civilizations had grown up around Starways ports over eons, long before mankind had set foot from its mythical origins on the Old Lost Earth—much as every early race's towns were said to have grown up near rivers and streams on their home worlds. The Starways were little-understood transit ways beyond and outside of time and space, part of the larger motherverse. In that tumbling condensate stream, stars became whirling motes. Time became smoke. Matter became metaphor, where you could scream along in a train or car or atmosjet, and cross a million light years in a million seconds. It was beyond ken—outrange of any need to know.

Amela heard the distant chorus of a wolvine hunting pack. The animals were celebrating the full moon in a frigid arctic night on their home world. Those were the true Malauns, she thought, the genuine natives. There were also the legendary Fith, human or humanian forest dwellers on the equator—a handful of elusive, stone age people. It was said the Fith were cannibals and headhunters—not merks but the real thing, with spears, medicine pouches, and white spirit-paint. They floated like ghosts amid the impenetrable Urwald of the jungle continent near the equator. It was the only place on Manaul 5 where Sekurita feared to go, a place ruled by far worse than the macabs—spiders, snakes, land crabs, forest eels, things that lurked and stabbed and poisoned and gloated as they watched their prey slowly suffer and die. The Fith somehow lived in that world, where no modern human dared to tread. The Fith were said to speak a remote derivative form of Humansh, and had probably emerged thousands of years ago from the hidden Starways portal. For all its terrors, the jungle continent was every prisoner's hope of escape to freedom. Nobody doubted that the jungle continent was of interest to Swarm strategians—and Major Rulla Texel, their eager handmaid in Aerag-78, who sought promotion and her own escape.

Like the other hundred women out that night, she dared not slow down or show emotion—the Sekurita overseers missed almost nothing, being human or humanian themselves, and never let on about the fringe stuff they may or may not have noticed. One prisoner might start crying hysterically and run off into the woods, to be shot from surprising vectors by she-merks. Another might start loudly denouncing the Kaarrk, and be ignored. The constant uncertainty was part of the terrible fear and tension by which Aerag officials kept control—not just over the body, but over the mind of every prisoner.

But there were recesses of mind and memory no torturer could reach, at least without killing the subject. Solan and Solanalos (Nally) lived on in the hinterland of Amela's mind, at #26 Gateway Lane, in the low, wide brown house with white window trim and black solar-shingle roof. In her mind, she would work in the yard. She kept track of the seasons as they would be on Belair. She played a game of planting each little garden crop in its appropriate season. She'd pick ripe produce. Her hands became black and fragrant with soil. She'd even take her harvest down into a savory cellars of her imagination, with hopes of making her husband and son happy.

There was very little likelihood that she would ever see them again, if they were even alive amid the horrors of war. Amela did what she must to get by. She never stopped being the woman she was when she signed up as a warrant officer for social and preventive medicine. Neither she nor Solan, her husband, had expected it to be anything more than routine, rear duty away from the shooting and looting. But in the Treaty Marches wars, as defined by the cold-blooded Swarm aliens, there was no rear, there was no free zone, there was no neutral ground. Amela had been taken while orbiting off Raum 17, as part of her hospital ship and its complement. The ship had been converted to a prisoner ship. The humans on board had been taken vast numbers of light years to the fringes of the Swarm Confederation, and dumped on Manaul 5 as ransom reserves.

So here she was, carrying firewood, dressed in rags, along with ten thousand other drably dressed and blank-stared women. Aerag-78 was all women. No man ever set foot here. The women had been amputated from wifedom, from motherhood, from daughterness, from sisterhood. They had been severed from the very meaning of their barren wombs. Their monthly cycle said to date to the tidal and lunar machinery and three-body dance (Earth, moon, sun) in the primordial genesis system of the Old Lost Earth (a myth, most people believed).

The women shivered as they trudged, in arctic night without end, through the drifts and cesspool stinks of Aerag-78. Among them were a powerful, snake-eyed little maffea of human betrayers—the camp population's human crime syndicate. Over them in the hierarchy were trusted, broken camp orderlies or capors. Often they worked together. Everybody feared everyone else. Fear made the camp function. The highest rank of non-Kaarrk were Sekurita, in their neatly starched uniforms and fancy police skimmers, but they let the capors and inmates do the dirty work, assisted by the merk camp scavengers (here, all women) hanging just beyond the camp periphery. The merks had their own warm barracks. They flew dented skimmers and strapped on hand-me-down weapons for the sport of woman-hunting. As in the Treaty Marches, life in the Aerags was a powder keg skillfully managed by the wily Swarm, who mostly kept to their orbiting stations, from which they directed and monitored the Aerags below.

Amela did her best to stay separate from other prisoners as a matter of survival. She cultivated being a loner, and avoided the many sorts of situations into which you could get sucked, and end up with a blade in your ribs when the harsh morning corridor lights came on. She was always looking for that one unexpected slip, that chink in the system, her way to escape. And what did escape mean? She first had to get to the equator, away from this eternal freezing hell. To live free seemed like the ultimate paradise, now that she had lost her freedom and her loved ones. She could be quite philosophical about it because,while the aliens and Sekurita kept her body busy to wear her down, her mind was free to either be a vacuum like space, or to fill with thoughts and longings.

Oh, Solan and Nally…Oh #26 Gateway Lane…oh grape arbor…

Better to die free than be safe in captivity, she thought. She imagined herself enjoying a few hours or days of liberty while on the run. Beyond that, she could not imagine what might happen, except she bet 50-50 it could end with her bleached bones half buried in Manaul's fierce equatorial deserts. Even that seemed a better fate than this endless, bone-numbing cold. A woman could grow tired just from shivering. You could not control the chattering of your own teeth, which numbed the mind further with constant jackhammer rhythm. Your jaws hurt, as did the muscles all around your lips.

At night, as exhausted prisoners chattered in the dark before exhausted sleep, she heard about the Pitz Boat. Maybe it was a lie, but it was certainly a faint hope. What if she could get away from Manaul 5 and back to her own world? She would give anything, even her life, to try and once again be in human company. She often dreamed of being at a banquet table, with Solan at her right and Nally at her left. Just like in the ancient SOROE Scriptures, only you had to be dead for that, and she wasn't planning for it. Solan would smile through his scholarly looking beard as he raised the gravied platter of holiday bird for all to see. Nally was forever a small boy with pudgy little paws and a smeared mouth, toothlessly smiling in total innocence and joy as he clapped his dirty palms together. The most dreadful thing that she had lost was motherhood. Every tormented hour that passed, she forever lost a little more of her son's precious life—though luckily, by now, he must be a young man with a dazzling smile, handsome face, quietly assured demeanor, and girls interested in him.

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